A Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne stated in a statement, that the company was already investigating these topics at Allen's report. We have set up teams, created new policies, and worked with industry peers to address these issues since then. We have taken aggressive enforcement action against these types of inauthentic groups, and we share the results on a quarterly basis.
MIT Technology Review discovered that five of the troll farm pages mentioned in this report remained active during fact-checking shortly before publication.
This is the largest troll-farming page that targets African-Americans, which was active on Facebook in October 2019.
According to the report, troll farms were targeting the same demographic groups as the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, (IRA), during the 2016 election. This agency had previously targeted Christians, Black Americans and Native Americans. BuzzFeed News' 2018 investigation revealed that at least one member, who was indicted in connection with the 2016 US election interference, had visited Macedonia during the emergence its first troll farm. However, it couldn't find any concrete evidence. Facebook stated that its investigations had not found any connection between the IRA, Macedonian troll farm and the IRA.
This is not normal. Allen said that this is not healthy. Inauthentic actors have been able to build huge followings for unknown reasons. It is a huge risk for the 2020 US election that actors who may have ties to IRA have access numbers of people in the same demographic groups as the IRA.
He said that as long as troll farm success with these tactics is maintained, any other bad actor could use them.
Allen wrote the report in the fourth and last installment of a long effort to understand troll farm operations. According to the report's author, he quit the company in the same month due to frustration at the leadership for not doing his research. Allen declined to comment.
The alarming state of affairs revealed by the report is that Facebook's top leadership has been leaving the platform for many years despite repeated promises to combat foreign-based electoral interference. The full report is being made available by MIT Technology Review, although employee names have been redacted. This is because it is in public interest.
These are its revelations:
Around 15,000 Facebook pages had a majority US audience as of October 2019. They were run from Kosovo and Macedonia. These two countries were known for being bad actors in the 2016 election.
The combined troll-farm pages, which the report considers a single page for comparison, reached 140 million US users per month and 360 million worldwide users each week. Walmart's page attained the second-largest US audience of 100 million.
These troll farm pages combined to create the largest Christian American Facebook page, reaching 20 times more users than the next largest, with 75 million US users per month. 95% of those users had never been to any of the pages. The largest African-American Facebook page, reaching three times the number of users per month than the next largest, with 85% of them having never followed any of these pages. The second-largest Native American Facebook page, with 400,000 monthly users, 90% of which had never followed any pages. The fifth largest women's page on Facebook reached 60 million users per month, 90% of whom hadn't followed any of the pages.
Troll farms are mainly focused on the US, but they also target Australia, India, Central and South American countries.
Multiple studies have been conducted by Facebook that show content with a higher likelihood of receiving user engagement (likes and comments) is more likely to be of bad quality. Facebook has not stopped ranking content in newsfeeds based on what type of engagement it will get.
Facebook prohibits pages from simply copying and pasting content from other areas of the platform, but it does not enforce this policy against known bad actors. Foreign actors can post completely copied content while still reaching a large audience even if they don't speak the local language. As high as 40% of US pages' page views were at one time attributed to pages featuring unoriginal content, or material with limited originality.
Troll farms were previously introduced to Facebook's Ad Breaks and Instant Articles partnership programs. These programs are intended to assist news organizations and other publishers in monetizing their videos and articles. A lack of quality control meant that 60% of Instant Article reads went to content plagiarized from other sources. Troll farms were able to blend in without being noticed and even receive payment from Facebook.
Facebook allows troll farms to grow their audience and Facebook makes it possible
This report focuses on troll farms that are based in Macedonia and Kosovo. They are run by people who don't necessarily know American politics. They can have an impact on political discourse due to the way Facebook's reward system for newsfeeds is designed.
